I found this comment amusing given the fact that the poll and the description of the poll show a dramatic erosion of Apple's market share...

What's so amusing about it? It's quite possible they are capturing 80-90% of the total profit earned on all tablets worldwide, and they are one of the biggest single sellers by units - it's just like the phone market. Who else is in a stronger position?

Apparently these days the Shenzen wholesale rate for a decent 7" android tablet is about $35 if you order of 20K units or more - so anyone not at the high end of the market is going to struggle to make money. I'd expect that slice of generic red to expand past 50% fairly quickly.

Also - one fifth of US adults own a tablet? That's an extraordinary statistic. The Pew Article mentions another survey that shows 25%. That means either I'm massively out of touch with what is going on, or else they are using the usual 'skimp on survey methodology to cut costs' routine and ignoring all those adults who don't spend a large chunk of their time online answering online surveys.

It depends on how the global market breaks down in terms of product acceptance. I wouldn't mind seeing a breakdown of tablet sales by price+region myself. Depending on the product in question it isn't unheard of for one region to dominate sales so strongly as to effectively *be* the global market for that product.

For eink ebook readers the global market is, effectively, the anglosphere; NorthAm+UK+the antipodes = 90% plus of the market volume.
Or, in rear projection HDTVs, 99% of the market is North America because they are too bulky for asian living rooms and european retailers don't particularly like to stock them for the same reason.

It also depends on how the devices are perceived and/or marketed.
If we look at the reception/reviews of the various tablet platforms it is easy to see that, when buying tablets, US consumers are buying content access devices, while other regions are buying portable computing power or simply cheap websurfing devices. Not all unit sales are created equally in the eyes of vendors; profit margin and total profit matters, too. (iPhone, for example, captures a disproportionate portion of global smartphone profits--it may be that the US contributes a disproportionate part of global tablet profits.)

When it comes to media consumption devices, the US in particular has several features that make them particularly attractive to consumers and to vendors--starting with ready availability of video content from dozens of sources and a variety of business models: subscriptions, ala carte, free...
(Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Vudu, Amazon, Nook, ePix, XBOX, PSN, iTunes, Crunchyroll, uVERSE, xFinity, HBO, ESPN, are just a few off the top of my head...) It is (relatively) *easy* to set up content delivery services in the US. This makes it easier to copy Apple's walled garden content model, as proven by Amazon who went from zero to 22% market share in barely six months.

Just how important the US market is in the tablet space can only be guessed at, but the fact that the global companies seem to be tailoring their products to the US and usually launch there first suggests it is a key, high volume market to them. (Just as non-Apple smartphones tend to launch first in asia or europe.)

Vendors go where the money is.
And the money is usually what determines what the products look like.

But, if Apple does release a smaller iPad and prices it right, I do think a lot of people will be buying them.

Same opinion here. Although Apple probabbly are following the crowd, it is necessary to make a product that is cheaper and smaller. However, I don't think this would be a smart move in the long-run, since this kind of "maximize profit strategy" could only effective in short-run.

Anyway, hope they will bring more of breakthrough products in the future.

For tablets? I doubt it.
The most popular non-Apple tablet, the Kindle Fire, isn't available elsewhere.

The Nexus 7 is also not available everywhere, whereas the iPad is.
Of note: 62% of Apple revenue comes from International sales so it's not as if their international popularity is all that much lower than in the US.http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/24/apple-q3-2012/

I'd like to point out that those numbers are not market share, they are ownership. It looks like the statistics were done in a bad way since it doesn't account for people owning more than one tablet (for one the 4% other mysteriously disappeared).

Let's say that there are approximately 250 million adults in the US.
According to the data in 2011, 11% of them owned tablets, so 27.5 million (22.275 mil ipad, 4.125 mil Android, 1.1 mil other).
According to the data in 2012, 22% of them owned tablets, so 55 million (28.6 mil ipad, 26.4 mil Android of which 11.55 mil Kindle fire).

I'd like to point out that those numbers are not market share, they are ownership.[...]
Let's say that there are approximately 250 million adults in the US.
According to the data in 2011, 11% of them owned tablets, so 27.5 million (22.275 mil ipad, 4.125 mil Android, 1.1 mil other).
According to the data in 2012, 22% of them owned tablets, so 55 million (28.6 mil ipad, 26.4 mil Android of which 11.55 mil Kindle fire).

Does this sound right?

Nope, as that would mean that Apple only sold ~6.5m iPads in the US in a year, which isn't right.
We know from released court documents that Apple sold over 10m iPads in the US in the first two quarters of 2012: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/10/...in-court-case/

I suspect that the figures are actually %age of current sales, not %age of ownership. At the end of Q2 2012 Apple had sold a total of 34m iPads in the US. That is a pretty big head start in total ownership.

What's so amusing about it? It's quite possible they are capturing 80-90% of the total profit earned on all tablets worldwide, and they are one of the biggest single sellers by units - it's just like the phone market. Who else is in a stronger position?

Taking the "decades" view of the author, I'd say Samsung. Not because of the tablets they are making now. But because they are a much more diverse company. Also looking at Apple's roller-coaster past due to their strategy of remaining proprietary, and just the dramatic changes in market share over the past year.

Apple may be financially strong now, but fortunes can change quickly in this industry. Ask RIM. Or Palm. Granted, Apple has a much stronger ecosystem than either of those two did which will help. But I'm starting to see the same lag in their products. The competition is to the point now that no longer being invested in their ecosystem, I have absolutely no desire to enter it again now. I wouldn't have said that last year.

Nope, as that would mean that Apple only sold ~6.5m iPads in the US in a year, which isn't right.
We know from released court documents that Apple sold over 10m iPads in the US in the first two quarters of 2012: http://www.macrumors.com/2012/08/10/...in-court-case/

I suspect that the figures are actually %age of current sales, not %age of ownership. At the end of Q2 2012 Apple had sold a total of 34m iPads in the US. That is a pretty big head start in total ownership.

But it doesn't mean that the 34 mil iPads were sold to different people. Some were just upgrades, some were replacements for those that broke down.

Does anybody think that passing away of Steve Jobs has anything to do with this? I say yes, their money man is gone. And yes, their lawyers sure create a bitter impression in public about the company.

The answer is maybe. The commoditization of great ideas is normal. The innovator takes the lion's share of the profits then the immitators scramble for what's left. Apple retains their price insensitive parish. This happened with computers, mp3 players, and cell phones. Now it is happening with tablets.

Historically, each ebbing innovation has funded the next wave. The question is whether Apple has a next wave and, if they do, how amazing it will be. Unless Jobs was only the face of innovation or they find someone to take his place, each successive wave will be smaller than the last until Apple fades away.